New Junker Healer

General Discussion
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Junker healer.

Primary weapons.

LMB - “Nail gun” - It fires dirty rusty nails, rapid fire projectile, reasonable accurate, but, has drop and flight time.

RMB - “Healing drone”. - you target a player, and he flings the drone out to them. It does quite a lot of healing over time, draining its resource while the hero is damaged. It also speed up the target a little. (this is so the devs can balance it for different ELOs, see latter comment to see how that works)

You can RMB to reassign it to another target. You can hold RMB to return it early.

Once it is out of resource, it returns, and recharges, soon is ready to fire again. This does a LOT of healing, very quickly (you can save people with it like you do with a Zarya bubble). The hero is a primary healer, with a mediocre weapon, no ability to heal more than one target at once, and their escape isn’t great. They make up with it by saving people and enabling them to fight better.

The Junker Healer self heals slowly, but only when the drone is returned.

Non AOE, and long ranged, it enables DPS more than tanks.

Abilitys

“Hold still you little worm” - (e) Aka, a Harpoon to deal with problem patients who try to run.

Fires a harpoon, and connects the rope to the ground, they can move some distance from their starting location, but, not too far. Medium cooldown. This is like sleep dart, but strictly weaker, They can fire back and move to some degree.

But like sleep dart, it punishes people who have over extended.

“Sod this” - (shift) Uses harpoon gun to widow hook. Escape, and general mobility, short cooldown.

ULT

“RUN!”. Everyone on their team is VASTLY speed up., for a shortish time. Good for defence, GREAT for pushes.

6 Likes
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Im interested to see any new heroes in the junker variety. I had the idea that they could use an ability to tinker with the payload to increase its speed, or make a health pack wherever they wanted

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Design considerations

This hero is designed to be easy on the developers to balance, as well as scratch that MMO style resource juggling healing.

It is VERY much a strong base kit, with kinda weak extra abilities design, like Tracer, but… Without the balancing for all ELO’s problem Tracer has.

The Ult
The ult is designed in part to act as a standard support ult, someone chucks something big, and everyone scatters. It is a counter ult to Blizzard, D’va bomb, etc.

It has a second use, and that is to counter Bunker / Pirate ship. If everyone is on peoples face in a second, then pirate ship / bunker falls pretty quickly. Lower ELOs need a better way to counter them than EMP, since, they can’t organise well enough to EMP and push.

It is REAL strong in higher ELO for general pushing, which is good, since, hero’s like Moira struggle to be relevant there. Between the speed boost from Drone, and the ult, the Junker healer should find a place in the higher ranks as well.

Balance

This hero has a SURPRISING number of levers for the developers to pull to re-balance it at Different ELOs which is a problem with a lot of the current heroes.

At lower elo’s the speed buff from the drone won’t be as useful, but, at higher ELO’s it will.

To effect the Hero for Higher ELOS more than lower ones.

Buff/Nerf speed from drone - higher ELOs make use of extra speed far better than lower ELOs.

Change resource pool size - higher ELOs will make better use of the resource pool, by making it bigger / smaller will effect the lower ELOS more than the higher ones.

Handling the resource pool for the drone is a big deal, Junker Healer can and will run out of resource. Often… Pulling the drone as soon as a person is out of danger is going to be important. Leaving the drone to empty itself slowly on a fully healed person is a HUGE waste of resource, so, juggling the drone between people who need it, and pulling it out as it needs to be is going to be a big deal.

The Harpoon

It is an interesting ability, which, like hogs hook, is really there to punish people who are out of position, or help secure kills from someone wanting to leave the combat.

It is VERY support, in that, you are setting the person up, to be killed by someone else. The nail gun isn’t a great weapon, and really isn’t the point of the hero.

It is technically a form of CC, but, without the annoying part of CC where you have your abilities removed or you are stunned (though, tele, blink, etc will only get you so far)

It doesn’t stop you moving like a junkrat trap does. It doesn’t stop you fighting back like sleep dart. It doesn’t leave you helpless like Freeze. It doesn’t block abilities you are casting like Flashbang / Bash.

What is DOES do, is give the team of the harpooned person a choice. Do we go in and save them, or not? It also is good as counters to various things. Harpooning a running Bob, or D’va bomb, or Ulting Genji will limit but not completely stop the damage they can do.

The Gun

Being projectile, it isn’t bad, because of lack of damage falloff, and technically will help break shields, and make going into the area where it is firing a bit of a bad idea, but… like Mei, it is going to take a lot of practice to get a lot of value out of it.

2 Likes
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I can dig it. :ok_hand:

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you;d need to make the nail gun a very unique projectile like tf2 medic’s syringe gun to deter people from playing her like a flank dps.

That harpoon “dog leash ability” just begs the player to 1v1 people.

Big question - what is this hero’s self-heal option? every support has to have at least one.

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The gun is pretty bad. Flanking isn’t going to really all that viable.

What it DOES have is no damage falloff (being projectile). So being at some range is better for the healer. Which stops a lot of flanking. The TF2 syringe gun was a big part of what I was thinking when I put in the nail gun. So well spotted :slight_smile:

Mostly you would really need to hit those shots to be able to flank, and you could do a lot more not flanking.

For self healing I was thinking about having slow self healing while the drone is returned, which is more tradeoffs, which is also very support like.

I’ll put that in the post.

2 Likes
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naw dude, just make his weapon the blutsauger :slight_smile:

that is one of the most fun weapons in tf2 haha. Also, if the drone performs in a “fire and forget” way like zen’s harmony orb, then it’s fine if the player spends his time shooting a lot.

edit: i’m calling it btw, a syringe gun type projectile WILL be added at some point

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I do like the harpoon idea as light CC.
Can enemies destroy the health drone or harpoon?

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It isn’t meant to be fire and forget. It will drain it’s resource pretty quickly on badly damaged heroes.

Think of it like a resource driven healing Zarya bubble. You can and will save people from dieing with it, and heal trash damage, and preempt people going in, etc. It is crazy versatile, and you will be juggling that versatility a lot.

It is very strong, but, requires a lot of baby sitting to get the most out of it.

The gun is very much secondary, nice, fun, but not really the point of the hero.

Maybe the harpoon, but, since the hero it has pinned can also fire at it, I’m leaning to not. Making it just a timed thing means it won’t become useless at higher ranks, where it wouldn’t last a second. If you can pin an ulting Genji, then you should have somewhat countered him, rather than just wasted a slash.

Shooting the drones target will drain drone resource as it heals them, so, enough damage will shake the drone off, as it needs to go home to get resource.

Like Moira, if you put it on a D’va who is out in the open taking heavy fire, your resource will not last long.

Unlike Moira you will get the resource back quickly without your team thinking that you have gone full DPS support on them.

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Interesting concept, I’m down for it :slight_smile:

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